A survey conducted by the NGO, Mumbai Environmental Social Network has found a big gap between demand and supply of parking spaces in Mumbai. An estimated 60,000 cars are added to the city roads each year. With each car requiring three parking spaces – one each at work, home and other occasions — it needs 100sqft of parking. It amounts to a staggering 150 acres of parking space for 60,000 cars. On the other hand, there are only 120 parking lots in the city providing about 7,000 parking spaces. A part of these are in multi-storey parking lots which charge a fee, but occupancy is quite low due to the availability of free parking. This is evident in the1.5 lakh cars that the survey found parked on the city roads. The survey suggested minimising drastically the availability of free parking spaces on roads to increase the use of paid parking lots and to discourage the excessive use of private vehicles on the congested city roads.
